


a way to reach home, barefoot

by Siria



Series: After the Other [9]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-06
Updated: 2009-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-03 19:06:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronon's been at Trinity for about three weeks by the time his department gets around to organising a welcome party for him (ah, Rodney says with a philosophical sigh as he tugs on his jacket before heading out the door with John, the mills of the Trinity administration grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly... well, 'lumpy and awkward' rather than 'small' and is there any particular reason why they're holding this thing at seven on a Tuesday?).</p>
            </blockquote>





	a way to reach home, barefoot

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Maverick4oz](http://maverick4oz.livejournal.com/), with thanks to [Jenn](http://dogeared.livejournal.com/) for betaing.

Ronon's been at Trinity for about three weeks by the time his department gets around to organising a welcome party for him (_ah_, Rodney says with a philosophical sigh as he tugs on his jacket before heading out the door with John, _the mills of the Trinity administration grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly... well, 'lumpy and awkward' rather than 'small' and is there any particular reason why they're holding this thing at seven on a Tuesday?_). This means that Ronon and John have had plenty of time to strike up a friendship—built on a mutual appreciation of strong, over-sugared tea from the Arts block café; movies where things blow up in a ludicrously spectacular manner; and having lunch outside while watching the duck that lays her eggs on Trinity's grounds each year shepherd her goslings around the quads in preparation for the big move to the pond on Stephen's Green—and so John and Rodney are both invited to the party despite the fact that neither of them really knows anyone else in the French department.

Luckily, neither of them are averse to applying the traditional Irish remedy for those in need of some social lubrication—alcohol and plenty of it; whiskey for Rodney, Guinness for John. By the time the two of them leave Doyle's, John's still laughing to himself at Ronon's attempts to explain the French equivalent of knock-knock jokes—those French; they're _funny_—and Rodney finds that the pavement on D'Olier Street isn't quite as level as it was just a few hours ago. It starts to drizzle while they huddle together under a street light, waiting for the last bus home, and by the time they get off the bus back in Drumcondra, the heavens have opened and John shivers at the drops of rain that find their way under the collar of his t-shirt and down the length of his spine.

They wait for the bus to pull off before running across the road and heading up the street towards their house. Rodney loudly tells John that his socks are entirely too wet for 11.20pm on a Tuesday, and John's snort of laughter startles the little group of St Pat's students that they meet who are heading home from The Cat and Cage.

"You'll be grand," he says, trying to make exasperation outweigh the affection in his voice and not quite succeeding. "Sure a little rain never hurt anyone."

"A little rain?" Rodney says, looking up at the night-dark sky where thick rain clouds have obscured the full June moon. "This is Ireland, there's no such thing as a _little_—" And that's always been Rodney's problem, John thinks—walking into things without looking first, trusting that the ground will stay solid beneath his feet—because his words are cut off with a sudden, startled squeak when he realises that he's ankle-deep in a puddle caused by a backed-up storm drain. "My socks!" he says, and he sounds so mournful, so befuddled at a nefarious universe that would conspire to give him damp toes, that John can't resist—he takes Rodney by the wrist, tugging him so that they're standing hip to hip in the middle of a rain storm, and John grins and keeps his eyes open as he leans in to kiss Rodney.

Rodney's mouth is rainwater-cool against his, the little noises he makes eager and greedy, and beneath the tips of John's fingers, he can feel how the pulse in Rodney's wrist has sped up a little just from this alone: the two of them dawdling late-night at a street corner on their way home, John paying special attention to the curl of happiness that lives in the curve of Rodney's mouth, the asymmetric fit of body against body.

"You were saying?" he asks when he pulls away, long minutes later.

Rodney just blinks at him, looking like some new-discovered species of Muppet—eyes wide and pupils blown, mouth agape, hair hedgehog-mussed by John's wandering fingers—and it takes him one or two attempts at speech before he manages to say, "You're unreasonably hot, you know that?"

John smirks and arches his left eyebrow in a manner he's always privately thought of as suave, sophisticated, designed for seduction—and so while he's a little put out that at first it makes Rodney burst out laughing and call him a gobdaw, his faith in his method is restored when Rodney says _come on, James Bond, home, bed_, the edge of his voice tremulous with something that might be laughter, or simple happiness.

***

In one sense, John had been right. Their Tuesday night soaking didn't do _Rodney_ any harm, and he rolls out of bed the next morning in search of tea humming whatever obnoxious pop song is playing when the clock radio clicks on without even displaying any evidence of ill-effects from all the Bushmills' he'd consumed. John, on the other hand, moans when Rodney tries to open the curtains to let in the light of a washed-clean summer's morning and he pulls the duvet up over his head to block it out. His throat feels like it's been rubbed with fine sandpaper, the long muscles of his arms and legs ache, and his head aches worse than the consumption of a few pints of Guinness could account for.

Rodney picks up one corner of the duvet and peers beneath it. "John?"

John groans and tries to bury his head beneath a pillow. "Noooo," he croaks.

Rodney leans in and peers at him for a long moment, before jumping back like he's been given an electric shock. "Christ, are you _sick_?"

"No?" John tries, because maybe if he doesn't _admit_ to it his sinuses will stop feeling like they've been packed with gunk. Denial's served him well in the past; but then he sneezes five times in rapid succession and he's forced to change his story to a "Maybe?"

"Oh my god, you're sick! Stay right there, don't move, I'll be right back." He drops the duvet back over John's head and disappears. John can hear Rodney's feet clattering down the stairs and disappearing into the kitchen. He lies there and stares at the warm darkness that lives beneath their striped duvet and wonders at the fact that Rodney thinks John's planning on going _anywhere_ right now. There's a period of about five minutes where John can hear all sorts of sounds coming from the kitchen—clanking, press doors opening and closing, kettle boiling, a startled _meow_ from George, and either Rodney is hunting for something in the cupboards or he's constructing something. A robot would be pretty cool, John thinks idly; but when Rodney clumps back up the stairs and peels back the duvet with all the care of a microbiologist approaching a sample of deadly spores, he's wearing a pair of rubber gloves and he's clutching a mug of steaming-hot Lemsip in one hand.

"No robot?" John asks blearily, pulling himself up to sit against the pillows and accepting the drink from Rodney.

"Robots?" Rodney asks, wide-eyed. "Oh my god, has it reached your _brain_? Okay, okay, this is—I need to go get extra supplies. The chemist, Tesco, I will be as quick as I can, you drink your Lemsip and try not to hallucinate while I'm gone, okay?"

"Okay," John says agreeably, and sits there sipping at the drink and wondering if he can feel it going to work on his sinuses while Rodney fusses around him—tucking in the duvet tight around John's legs, turning the TV on low so John can watch badly-dubbed re-runs of _Scooby Doo_ on TG4, and pulling the curtains closed again so that the bedroom is pleasantly dim and cool. Rodney stoops to kiss John before he leaves, remembering only at the last moment why he can't kiss John on the mouth, and settles for planting on kiss on John's temple before stumping down the stairs and banging the front door shut behind him.

John lies there in peace and quiet for about three minutes after Rodney's crunched his way down the gravel drive, watching Scooby and Shaggy run away from a zombie. (_Good plan_, John thinks with Lemsip-doped approval.) But it's too quiet with Rodney gone, and John feels cold and cranky, and so he rolls out of bed and staggers over to the chest of drawers in the corner. He rummages through the bottom drawers for a moment before he finds what he's looking for—Rodney's oldest hooded sweatshirt, its cotton faded and paint splattered and so soft that John sighs when he pulls it on. He tugs the hood up over his head, hooks the sleeves down over his hands, and then crawls back under the bed covers. Some discontented, cranky knot that's been living behind his breastbone since he woke up starts to loosen, and by the time Rodney gets back John's warm and dozing, feet twitching a little under the duvet.

Rodney kicks off his shoes just inside the bedroom door, and comes to sit next to John as he unpacks his shopping bag, showing each item to John as he places it on the bedside locker, as if they are exotic curiosities whose purpose John can't fathom without instruction. "Let's see," he says, "Some paracetemol—dissolvable kind, not the tablets, because I know all about your irrational thing for... and some Vitamin C and some zinc, and I know they're mostly panaceas but bolstering your immune system with something that at least _could_ be in a fruit mightn't be such a bad idea, knowing what your diet is like... Oh! And I got a bag of grapes, and some mandarins, in case you have too much of a weakness in your arms to be able to peel proper oranges, and some VapoRub, though, hrm, opinion may be divided on how that's going to work with _your_ chest hair."

John lies there and watches him with a vague kind of expectation, because there's no real room left on the locker—crowded as it already is with a lamp, radio, John's glasses, a battered Penguin paperback copy of _Persuasion_ with a bookmark stuck in it at page 222, a notepad and pen—and Rodney's shopping bag is still half full. "Chocolate, that's for me, also touch these Pringles and you die... Hrm. I got you one of these little neck pillow things, I can heat it in the microwave for you and it might help with the aches? And some menthol capsules to breathe in, and an extra-large box of Barry's..."

John wrinkles his nose. "Don't we already have enough tea bags in the kitchen to keep a Macra na Feirme AGM going?"

Rodney looks vaguely appalled at such a reference. "God, you're such a culchie, and _yes_ we have plenty of tea but these are emergency supplies."

"Ohhhh," John says, as if that explains everything, then sneezes five times in quick succession, so hard that he feels as if his head is about to fall off. "Ugh."

"Kleenex," Rodney says firmly, pulling out a large box of tissues from the depths of his bag, and glaring at John until he blows his nose with them. "In the bin," he says when John's done, holding up the rubbish bin that normally lives in their en suite, and if Rodney's treating him a little bit like a five-year-old who needs cosseting, well, John's just a little bit grateful for that.

The last two items to be removed from the bag are a box of Jaffa cakes, slightly battered around the edges, and crumpled, folded copy of the _Irish Times_. The former makes Rodney look happy, and the latter makes him look a little nervous, and John barely has time to work up to a little worry about that—usually when Rodney looks nervous about something, it means that either something's been broken or John's going to have to help him draft a letter of apology to _someone_, and he hopes that the look on Rodney's face doesn't mean that that someone is the editor of the _Times_—before Rodney hands the paper to John and points at the bottom half of the first page.

"You pissed off Louis Copeland?" John says, peering befuddled at the large ad for a suit sale. Rodney rolls his eyes and huffs and says "No, not the ad, you idiot, the article next to it."

"Oh!" John says, and refocuses his eyes and then he says, "_Oh_. Oh. That was today?"

"Yeah," Rodney says, and he's fidgeting and he's pale and his chin is lifted up just a fraction and John tries to ignore the way the newspaper is rattling a little in his hands—because Ireland isn't exactly New York or London or San Francisco and until today John had half been expecting that the legislation wouldn't really be published, that some TD would veto it or some opinion poll would make the government quietly shelve it.

"Really?" John asks him. "Do you—"

"I mean," Rodney says, cutting across him, "it's not like it'll be law for a while yet, and even when it is, we won't be able to do anything like, you know, in a church—would you want—I mean, I'm probably the most lapsed member the C of I has ever had, but maybe you'd like to, properly with a priest there and everything—and we couldn't adopt kids properly if, if you wanted to be a dad. And I know we've never talked about these things, but I saw this and I kind of hoped that maybe—"

"Rodney."

"And I know this isn't exactly the most romantic proposal ever, what with it being a spur of the moment thing and I don't really have the right words and you're all full of snot but I looked at the paper and I just thought, if you'd _choose me_, I'd—" Rodney stops and his mouth drops open and for a moment he stares at John until he's able to say, weakly, "Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph. I just proposed to you."

"Rodney."

"I just proposed to you and I used the word _snot_. God, Jeannie's going to kill me."

"Rodney?"

"What?"

John chews on his lower lip for a moment, because even at the times when his brain is working properly, it's hard for him to find the words to describe what it was that had made John look in an open door on the way back to his new office in the Long Library—what had made him look at a pair of broad shoulders and ink-stained fingers and bright blue eyes in a non-descript face and made him think _okay, yeah, sure; why not_ and stop by to introduce himself; what it is that keeps him with this man through three years of cups of tea and ham sandwiches, dirty socks under the bed and origami birds and _Battlestar Galactica_ reruns, through better and worse and blowjobs in really inappropriate semi-public places—and he settles for saying "Buddy. Chose you a while back."

"You did? Well, I mean I—oh." John can practically see the little wheels turning inside Rodney's brain, his eyes going unfocused as he thinks back over three years of them together and reconsiders them all in a new light. "Oh, okay. That makes sense. But you should have _told_ me we were, you know, all along, you enormous wanker. But we should still do this because, you know..."

"Tax cuts?" John says, offering Rodney an escape route from the ever greater linguistic knots he seems to be about to tie himself up in.

"Yes. Those," Rodney says, then clears his throat as if embarrassed. "Amongst, uh. Other things."

There's a long moment where John stares at Rodney and Rodney stares at John; and John's pretty sure that they're both thinking a word, _husband_, the weight of whose syllables is too much for either of them to utter it yet, though they've both known its meaning for a while now. "I'm not going to kiss you right now," Rodney said, "because you have to be an incubator for several million germs right now, and yes, I've rimmed you on numerous occasions, but I have limits. But I think I would really quite like to do the thing where we sublimate everything into sex, if that's okay with you?"

"Not very bendy right now," John says, but he's already shifting over in the bed, making room for Rodney to lie down behind him, his body curving close to Rodney's in search of soothing warmth and the familiar rhythm of Rodney's breathing.

"Shh," Rodney says, and this is one of the things John loves about him, one of the things hardly anyone else ever gets to see—how gentle Rodney can be, how much care he can take with another person's heart—and Rodney presses a kiss to the nape of John's neck as he pushes John's boxers down to tangle around his thighs.

His head's still stuffed up and it's hard to breathe, but that's not what makes John's breath stutter on the exhale, not what makes him reach back with one hand to grasp Rodney by the hip when Rodney takes him in hand—there's such pleasure to be had from something as simple as this, from Rodney stroking him until he's hard, until John's head rolls back against Rodney's shoulder and he lets his hips push forward.

"Love watching you like this," Rodney mumbles, biting gently at the spot where John's neck meets his shoulder. "So hot, John." Rodney tightens his grip until the pressure is just the way John likes it—good enough to make him moan, strong enough to make him feel like Rodney has him—and he shudders and wishes he could spread his legs wider. He's trapped, though, by the layers of sheets and duvets over him, by the boxers that are caught around his thighs, by how Rodney's wrapped around him, and all he can do is lie there and let Rodney go as slow as he wants; all he can do is lie there and let Rodney make him feel good while John groans and his sweat makes the sweatshirt of Rodney's that he's wearing grow damp and heavy.

"So good," Rodney says, rubbing the stubble of his jawline against John's neck. He reaches down to cup and caress John's balls, making John hiss before Rodney moves his hand back to John's cock. Rodney moves his hand faster now, urging John on to orgasm, and John can feel Rodney start to thrust against his ass. John pushes back against him, giving him some friction, wanting Rodney to feel as good as John does right now, and is rewarded with a chest-deep groan. "God," Rodney says, "f-fuck, god, when we're, we're, I'm going to fuck you so hard, I mean it, 'm gonna roll you over and, fuck, _John_."

And John closes his eyes and lets his head fall forwards and comes, knowing what Rodney means, pictures it behind closed eyelids—the two of them in this bed, burrowed beneath fresh white sheets, John on his belly and Rodney as deep inside of John as he can go, left hand tangled with left hand where two plain gold bands are slowly absorbing their body heat—and revels in a possibility that he hadn't known he'd had when he woke up that morning. Rodney lets go a minute or two after him, burying his face against the sweaty nape of John's neck, his hand still cupping John's softening cock, and he whispers something that John can't hear, but that he understands anyway with an instinct born of blood and bone.

"Yeah," he says, "me too," and pulls the duvet up over them both while he tangles his feet with Rodney and lets his eyes drift closed—and he thinks, in the weightless moment before he falls asleep, that he was right all along. A little rain never hurt anyone; a little rain in his life brought him to Dublin, brought him here, taught him the value of shelter against a grey sky.


End file.
